Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood
Bryan Magee
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: 2:00225660
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hoxton today is one of the most fashionable parts of inner London, yet within living memory it was the capital's most notorious slum area. 'Hoxton is the leading criminal quarter of London, and indeed of all England', wrote Charles Booth in a famous report at the beginning of the twentieth century. It remained a byword for its combination of poverty and crime until the Second World War - London's busiest market for stolen goods, the centre of the pickpocket trade, home to a razor gang that terrorised racecourses all over southern England. Its main thoroughfare, Hoxton Street, was one of the East End's best known street markets, but was known also as the roughest street in Britain. This Hoxton was swept away by the Blitz and the slum-clearance programmes. But among the people born there in its heyday is Bryan Magee, author, television broadcaster and Member of Parliament. For him it was home, for his first nine years, until he became an evacuee on the outbreak of war. In this moving and beautifully written book he recalls the vanished world of his childhood and brings it to life again in all its drama and surprise.
which involved the twining of stalks with wire to provide a help with street, this, so he would doing sit it Tom basis. where he was always glad of someone Taylor, who inter- was able to in his wheelchair in the Some to chat to. when the street kids occasionally tried to hassle him, but Mrs mine, of they did, kept an eye on him through the shop window, would be out of her front door like an arrow and send them flying with great swipes from her meaty hand, followed by
Army band. Fawkes, but everybody else called I my man who addressed him him Chopper because of He loved not only orchestral music but band music and took my father to a lot of it, not least because it was free his profile. too, - he knew every venue band for nothing. I London where you could hear a good remember being a very small boy with the in two of them at a band concert in which a a violin bow, and this the way My in I seemed to me man played a saw with miraculous.
had this venture had begun, three it not been so painful. in the smallest one, which looked out bed with my slept in a large single three and a half years older than me. straight ahead, facing over the street, and they had a double bed, in were never allowed to go The room was our parents' bedroom, which in there. sister I had been born. But we This was far and away the most forbiddingly expressed and reiterated domestic taboo of our child- hood: never, ever, no matter
BRYAN MAGEE every place of work, every office and every factory, every street, and every in-group of friends, there would be somebody who knew somebody who knew how of illegal a nation gamblers. In most areas the police, genuinely unable to control this nationwide in became to place a bet. Britain activity, and far less to suppress it, behaved accordance with the logic of the situation and went on the take from the bookmakers; and because they had to be seen be to taking
in the school playground, on the way to and from school. and There 179 BRYAN MAGEE was something wonderful about the freedom of this life, with no parental control and no school control either. As the boys con- verged on school they would meet up in the and sometimes become fight, streets and play, and one another so involved with what they were doing that a whole bunch of them would be in late for school together. games In addition to the to play I had played games